Tactalicious and craftalicious; Mabar, Artificer and you

I’ve found that of all my toons using my artificer in the Mabar event have been the smoothest and greatest so far. Even better than my divine and I dearsay better than arcanes that I play with.

And that’s not to say that arcanes (be it wizard or sorc) doesn’t have a wider selection of nukes, but I say ‘better’ in the sense that Artificer bridges the gap between physical DPS (such as beating on something with a melee or ranged weapons) and arcane/divine dps.

When I play my ranger or fightier it basically boils down to 1 or two weapons, chase whatever I’m killing and beat it to a pulp. In groups it’s kind of pointless since by the time I finish off a undead a arcane caster have already AOE’d my victim and the group it arrived in.

With my divine it’s similar to a arcane caster; use a mass heal or any other AOE (like firestorm, cometfall or any of the other cure masses) and ‘nuke’ a group of undead. And anyone that survive requires another nuke.

Artificer have 3 things at their disposal. A ‘nuke’ spell called tactical detonation, the trusted repeater and the rune arm.

First off the repeater – mine is a triple holy GS one. That adds greater disruption as primary bonus and lots of holy damage. Add to that the rune arm out of the madness chain in tower of twelve. I do have the light damage one from subt rare, but the rune arm charged attack is very innacurate. The acid one is 5 bolts, 1 in center and 2 to the side. It’s also ‘heat’ seeking with a pretty good chance of hitting. Ideally I’d love the Animus one – that’s a exploding fire bolt. But the one I use is as good as any and the primary form of attack is still the spell tactical detonation.

What makes that one so good is that it has 3 different types of damage. Fire, sonic and force. And all of them hurt. I also use a trinket with lower empower cost (II) and greater acid lore. And to my rune arm I crafter greater fire lore. And as enhancements I added 40% acid and force damage with 8% chance to crit on both with a 75% crit boost.

The cool thing with Artificers is that rune arms charged attacks are enhanced by items and enhancement lines. That makes their attack a lot more potent. As such my acid bolts generally crit for everything from the high 100’s to 500. And the tactical detonation with it’s fire damage part crits for 400 in average. So whatever is left after that spell can be taken care of by the repeater and the rune arm charged attack. I’ve managed to really hurt the lich like that.

Another thing is that the rune arm always add additional damage to the primary weapons. So the acid one adds a good 15-20 average acid damage to every shoot, followed by tons of holy, the greater disruption damage and if I want to spend the motes – 1d6 of light damage by drinking that potion.

And on top of that I always add Elemental damage infusion fire – which adds 1d6 fire to every single shot.

That’s tons of damage. I rarely have to move much – my runearm acid bolts and my repeater will move down mobile undead and my tactical detonation will severly fry large mobs. And that’s why it’s a perfect bridge between arcane and regular DPS with a lot less use of resources.

Finally – the pet.

I outfitted my pet with a disruption module and it’s fully capable of insta killing undead, but it also adds that extra disruption damage to every single hit. It can either be used to agro undead or simply clean up. Since I also gave it the agro line of enhancement it have a tendency to agro nearby undead so they surround my pet (I give it blur via scroll and stone skin for extra survival) and one tactical detonation later there’s not much to clean up.

One nice additional benefit of the tactical detonation spell is that it comes with a chance to knock down the opponent, which will help in crowd control and especially against combating survivals.